The only information that I have gathered concerning the general head now under consideration, that can, I conceive, be useful to my present Work, is the following passage; which I insert, here, on the judgement of the Reporter. P. 65. "From the best information I could obtain, it appears to me that fully one fifth part of the county of Devon is waste land which would amount to 320,000 acres; all of which, except perhaps, some part of Dartmore, is capable of improvement." RURAL ECONOMY. ESTATES.-P. STATES-P. 17. "The freehold property of the county of Devon is very much divided, perhaps more than in almost any county of England. The large tracts of country granted to the ancient barons, have been subdivided amongst their descendants, or sold, so that, a few families excepted, there are no very great proprietors, but there are a great number of gentlemen of easy independent fortunes, who pass their time chiefly on their own estates, and live in great harmony with each other, and with the respectable yeomanry in their neighbourhood." is TENURES.-P. 16. "In general, throughout the whole of the county of Devon, the land" (of the larger_estates) occupied" (held)" by tenants for the terms of ninety-nine years, determinable on three lives." P. 18. "Leases on lives afford an irregular kind of income to the proprietor, and the holder frequently pays so great a proportion of his little capital for the purchase, that be has only a small sum left, not perhaps sufficient to stock and work it with advantage. When these leases also hang on one life, it tempts the tenant to run out of the ground, from the apprehension of being obliged to pay a fine, on renewal, equal to the improvements he may have made. "On the whole, I found that the people in general are very desirous to possess themselves of leases on lives, from their considering it as a more permanent and independent species of property." TENANCY.-P. 17. "These life-estates are frequently let out for terms of seven, fourteen or twenty-one years, but many occupy their own." AGRICULTURE. AGRICULTURE. FARMS.-P. 17. “ Farms in general are small, from twenty to forty acres being the common run of the holdings in this county. Of late, the farms are beginning to increase, and one farmer is sometimes found to occupy two, three, or more, of these tenements; but I found very few farms exceed two, or at most three hundred acres.' OCCUPIERS.-P. 17. "In the South Hams in particular, the respectable class of yeomanry is more numerous than in any district of England I have seen. They live in great comfort, and exercise without parade, that old English hospitality which the refinements of modern manners have banished from many other parts of the kingdom. I observed with much pleasure, the attention they paid to their various dependants around them, and their kindness to the poor." PLAN of MANAGEMENT.-P. 20. (South Hams.)" The greatest part of the land in this district is under a course of husbandry; scarcely any of the land is kept wholly in grass, but is alternately under grain and grass, and no part is kept unbroken up by the plough, except the water meadows. The rotation of crops for this purpose, varies according to the skill and industry of the farmer." WORKPEOPLE.-P. 43. (South Hams.) "Wages are one shilling a day, and a quart of cyder. In harvest, the wages much the same, with as much cyder as they chuse to drink." IMPLEMENTS.-P. 43. "Carts are little used for the purposes of agriculture." MANURES.-P. 22. (South Hams.)" In the southern part of this district, they are at a considerable distance from lime, and they therefore make use of sea sand as a substitute for lime, to the amount of one or 200 seams per acre (each seam contains two bushels) which they mix with earth, the scrapings of the lanes, mud from ponds, bottoms of the ditches, &c. and above all, when they can collect it, with rotten dung, to the amount of about 120 seams each; all of which is generally carried on horses backs: on account of the country being hilly, carts are very little, or not at all, used, for the purposes of agriculture. "The best farmers spare no labour or expence, to collect these different manures, and mix them with each other with great care. This compost of dung, mud, and sea sand, * See Cornwall, p. 541, aforegoing. is is reckoned a most excellent manure, and more lasting than the composts with lime." TILLAGE." Skirting and Beat-burning."-This operation. is, in its effects, much the same as "paring and burning." But being performed by implements of draft, I here consider it as a kind of tillage, and insert Mr. F.'s slight sketch of it.-P. 21. (South Hams.) "This process, which, I believe, is peculiar to Devon and Cornwall, has been uniformly practised in this part of Devonshire for near 300 years; and whether the farmer intends to sow wheat or turnips, this is the uniform mode of breaking up grass lands. Skirting is properly a sort of half ploughing, as two or three inches of surface of the ley is left unturned, and is covered by the furrow, cut very thin, with the grassy side downwards; so that the grass side of the furrow, and the narrow balk which is left unturned, being in contact, soon rot by the fermentation of the sward. If for turnips, it is turned thin about Midsummer, and is immediately worked; if to lay to rot for wheat, in the fall of the year it is turned a little deeper. The operation is performed by a wing turned up the furrow side of the plough-share, which cuts the furrow the breadth the farmer chooses; generally about four inches and a half. "This operation is sometimes, also, performed by spading, or pairing with a breast plough; sometimes, also, with a mattock. But skirting with the plough is generally prac tised. The best time for this operation is before Christmas, if the grass can be spared: the winter frosts bring it into fine order, but in general it is done in summer. "After laying some time, it is cross cut with the plough and well worked with harrows, and either left to rot, or again harrowed and rolled with much care and labour, until the broken sod is made very light, and the earth shaken from the grassy roots and weeds, which are then raked together by hand into heaps, and burnt, which process is called beat burning." CATTLE. On this, the most valuable species of domestic animals,―taken all in all,-I find nothing that is satisfactory. I copy the following passage; as it requires correction.-P. 32. (South Hams.) "They are of the short horned breed, and have been in the south part of Devon from time immemorial. The best of this breed are excellent milkers, and answer well for either work or fatting. The oxen are generally turned off to fat at five or six years old, and run up to eight, ten, and twelve hundred weight. These cattle are larger and heavier than the North Devon breed, the beauty of which is so famed and well known, throughout the kingdom." The The South Ham breed of cattle,-if that district can be said to have one,-differs as much from the true shorthorned variety of the North of England, and the South of Scotland, as it does from the longhorned breed of the Midland Counties. The cattle seen in South Devonshire are mostly bought in, from the Cornish mountain, and Dartmore-side, breeders; who can rear them until they become fit for work, or the dairy, much cheaper than the arable occupiers of the South Hams. In a general view, they appear, either as an unimproved, or as a deteriorate, variety of the North Devonshire breed. SHEEP.-P. 33. (South Hams.) "There are to be found in this county both the polled and horned sheep. The polled sheep, generally called nott, or knott sheep, are of a large size, with long combing wool; shear on an average about eight pounds each. More attention has hitherto been paid to the wool, than to the carcass. The wether sheep run from fifteen to thirty pounds a quarter; the average about seventeen pounds a quarter." "GENERAL VIEW OF THE AGRICULTURE OF THE COUNTY OF DEVON; WITH OBSERVATIONS ON THE MEANS OF ITS IMPROVEMENT. 1813."* THIS is the fourth Report, by Mr. VANCOUVER, that has come under my examination,-and the sixth time I bave * At the head of a column of errata (chiefly verbal) stands the subjoined notice. P. xi.-"Lymington, Hants, 1st Oct. 1807. From the Author's itinerary engagements in a distant part of the kingdom, there was an absolute impossibility of conveying the proof-sheets for his examination, without creating a delay in the execution of the work, which was much wished to be avoided by the Honourable Board. The cousequence is the following Errata, which he requests the reader will take the trouble of correcting with a pencil, before he enters upon the perusal of the work." have found it requisite to bring his performances forward,in the course of the toilsome-though rarely irksome work, which I am now bringing to its close. What I have said of Mr. V.'s Report of Hampshire (p. 302, aforegoing) is applicable to this of DEVONSHIRE. It is strikingly characterized by a waste of words; and a perplexing arrangement of ideas. As a literary composition, it resembles those modern performances, that are rapidly written, for the amusements of general readers;rather than a well considered work, to convey instruction to practical men. The descriptions are mostly too diffuse; covering pages, where sentences, only, were required. Well sounding words glide from subject to subject, in the same paragraph; without the required points. Long periods, ill pointed, are intolerably teazing. The attention is engaged in discovering the meaning of the words, when it ought to be estimating the justness of the ideas which they are meant to convey. By this chaotic style of composition, unassisted by an index, the business of reference and research is precluded. In an "Introduction," from which the subjoined is an extract, the author thus speaks of his performance.P. v. "In prosecuting an inquiry of this nature, it may be proper to observe, that the Surveyor enters on the examination of the agricultural practice and general interests of the county, with a mind totally unfettered by any opinions or practices prevalent in its rural, commercial, or manufacturing departments. So little indeed has his attention been engaged of late years in the consideration of rural improvements (unless on the great scale of cutting down the woodland, and clearing the forests in Kentucky) and the interests of a community necessarily connected therewith, that on the commencement of the present Survey, he found it necessary to re-peruse, with considerable attention, the two Reports he formerly had the honour to prepare under the sanction of the Honourable Board, on the Agriculture of Cambridgeshire and Essex, before he entered upon the present inquiries. This recurrence to former labours, has tended to disperse the confusion of ideas which pressed upon his mind, in his endeavours to retrace impressions which once interested, although from lapse of time and other engagements, became in a manner disregarded." North Devonshire, would seem to have been Mr. Vancouver's principal STATION; and that being the only agricultural district of the County that I have not maturely examined, I have bestowed especial attention on Mr. V.'s Report of it. In what he has written of the other districts, |